The following are excerpts regarding Jack Parsons from Kenneth Grant’s book “Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God” – the second book in his Typhonian Trilogies.
[Page 28, Footnote 18]
In a letter to J. W. Parsons, who was operating a Lodge of the O.T.O. in California in 1945, Crowley wrote: “it is all right to initiate one’s mistress, but to reverse the process is severely forbidden.”
[Page 42]
In the letter to John W. Parsons quoted in Chapter Two (footnote quoted above – Ed.), Crowley was presumably referring to an occult tradition which he does not specify and which I have been unable to discover. Dion Fortune, on the contrary, perhaps because she was herself a woman, advocated initiation by women; her novels are based almost entirely upon this theme, and Austin Spare, himself an Adept, was inducted into the Mysteries by a woman.
[Page 51, footnote 15]
Marjorie Cameron claimed to be an avatar of Babalon whom Parsons evoked by means of Enochian magick. Parsons was, at the time, the head of Agape Lodge, the Californian branch of the O.T.O. (For further details, see The Magical Revival, Chapter 9.)
[Page 73]
One of the earliest positive manifestations of the new O.T.O. occurred, appropriately enough, in the New World, in the latter half of the 1940s, at the Californian Lodge of the Order headed by John W. Parsons (Frater 210). Working with the formulae of Thelemic magick, Parsons established contact with extraterrestrial beings of the order of Aiwass. Unfortunately, he lost control of the entities he evoked and one of them, obsessing the woman with whom he worked, drove him to self-destruction. This magical partner claimed to be the incarnation of the Scarlet Woman, and she whose Word is Life, Love, Liberty and Light proved too much for Parsons, who found in her a devouring flame. During this period of sex-magical Operations Parsons was engaged in nuclear research and, in 1952, blew himself to pieces when he dropped a phial of fulminate of mercury. Enemies of the Order used the incident as proof of Crowley’s satanic influence, though Crowley himself had repeatedly warned Parsons not to engage in traffic with entities whose credentials were suspect.
For all his mistakes, Parsons made inroads on the unseen worlds; he was one of those who paved the way for the present-day passion for things strange and occult, for drugs, UFOs, black sex, mutations and the probability (as against the mere possibility) of man’s communicating with supra-mundane Intelligences capable of transforming life on this planet, a phenomenon which Crowley had spent a lifetime trying to demonstrate.
[Page 188]
The political programme of the New Aeon was stated succinctly by Crowley in Liber Oz41 Questioned about his political aims, he replied: “I have no time at all to write politics. Our programme is stated clearly in Liber Oz, and it should be always kept in mind that this is very much the same thing in principle as old style American Republican individualism. I use the word ‘Republic’ in its widest sense. The existence of a Monarch would not interfere with it.”
-From a letter to Frater 210 (John W. Parsons) of California, 12 May 1945.
